ProgressOhio

Meet Kevin Coughlin - self-appointed messiah of right-wing Ohioans.

He's a conservative who once openly facilitated a discussion of gambling in Ohio.

He wants to consolidate school district services, but brags about keeping state boards from being consolidated into state agencies.

He brags about school funding and lowering property taxes, but was an original trustee of David Brennan's efforts to create Voucher and Charter Schools which siphon state funds away from schools and pressure districts into more property taxes.

He brags about fiscal conservatism and his "watchdog" awards but unabashedly also brags about supporting Bob Taft's tax increases opposed by most Ohio conservatives.

And he's fixated on image:

• Sponsoring the ill-fated ID requirement at the polls.

• Or trying to force colored license plates for sex offenders.

• Or talking bi-partisanship while attacking the new Democratic Governor with daily news releases mocking Turn-Around Ohio.

• Or mocking Ted Strickland with a meaningless Resolution meant to embarrass the Governor, which the House GOP Speaker refused to touch.

• And the erstwhile, Governor-"wanna"-be even looks the part as Columbus Monthly's legislative survey often mentions his hair, rather than his mind.

On paper, Kevin Coughlin is to legislators what PT Barnum was to a circus, until you realize that it's all an act - a circus act that involves high-wire leaps and bounds that often fail to connect.

But center-ring he has put himself, so in the age of google, just go to his website for his Vision in Focus: The Path to Progress and here is what you find:

Kevin Coughlin takes credit for Bob Taft's economic program. Wait - isn't Ohio in the bottom tier of most economic categories? And hey, didn't Ken Blackwell complain about how the Voinovich-Taft years had lost their economic way with high spending and lack of economic accountability? Well… somebody forgot to tell Cheerleader Kevin who brags about his fiscal restraint while unabashedly supporting those very same programs.

So let's go to his jobs record from his very own on-line treatise: A hundred new retail jobs in Cuyahoga Falls and 100 new jobs for those poorest of the poor in tony Hudson Ohio. How about 1,000 jobs for Honda - hey wait that's not in Summit County, it's in Union County. Or there is Kevin taking credit for Whirlpool in Canton, Solvay Polymers in Marietta, or H.C. Stark in Euclid, G.M. in Toledo - you get the picture. Just about the only idea Mr. Coughlin didn't rip off from former Development Director Bruce Johnson is his idea to buzz the Statehouse in an F-16 fighter jet.

Mr. Coughlin's all for education funding, but not for full DeRolph funding (says he and his colleague have met the "spirit" of the lawsuit - no doubt a rather ghoulish spirit to those in the education community.) He is also a devotee' of lowering property taxes. But, being from the land of Dave "White Hat" Brennan, he's all for siphoning property taxes away from public schools into low-performing Charter Schools. In fact, the early foundation looking at school vouchers had a young trustee who was none-other than Mr. Kevin Coughlin.

Kevin's all for Election Reform, but turned the issue into a national fiasco by having Ohio enact the strictest voting requirements since the Civil Rights Act did away with the poll tax back in Lyndon Johnson's day by -- among other things -- requiring ID at the polls. (Given the pounding Mr. Blackwell took over the issue, it is somewhat surprising that Mr. Coughlin would brag about this role.)

Oh yeah, and how about Coughlin the fiscal conservative who double dipped with a State University while voting on budgets involving the University of Akron where he served as a Professor for two years, before disappearing from it's rolls. (Could it have something to do with the rumored falling out between Kevin and Summit GOP kingpin Alex Arshinkoff - lord of what has become the University of Arshinkoff.)

Now, having tried to embarrass Ted Strickland over his comment on Iraq Refugees with a Senate Resolution that was rebuffed by his potential competition for right-wing supremacy, House Speaker Jon Husted, we can only wonder what Mr. Coughlin will have in store for us as that issue unfolds. Given his record, don't expect consistency if Iraqi refugees land in the shadows of Hudson's famous clock tower or the Winking Lizard in Peninsula, where lack of a tiger-clad Izod is cause for citizen profiling.

There are some noble things in his record, but the overall focus on image makes you wonder are even Coughlin's bread and butter proposals simply attention laden gimmicks within his circus tent. The Akron Beacon Journal editorial page needles Coughlin with references to his grandstanding frequently, so it clearly can be hard to tell where the sincere meets the veneer in the image-laden world of Mr. Coughlin.

So, ladies and gentlemen of Ohio, in the center ring, by his own choice, we meet Kevin Coughlin in 2007.

Brash, contradictory, controversial for the sake of controversy, attention starved to the point of inconsistency, Kevin Coughlin is equally ambitious and confident as he rises from a pre-office 1994 job of media consultant and general laborer at a "That's Italian" Restaurant in an Akron suburb, to serving as a State Senator and trust-fund baby in his present financial disclosures (an income listed as a gift from the Frances Rousseau trust is in Mr. Coughlin's 04, 05 JLEC FILING.)

It remains to be seen if the image is tainted or tinted. It certainly is not black and white and therein lies the problem for the image conscious State Senator. Given Kevin Coughlin's record, potential foes like Speaker Husted likely aren't worried about the act.

One thing Mr. Coughlin is no doubt discovering, even in the center ring, it takes an awful lot of precision to hold an audiences' attention when you start playing in bigger tents.